Beyond Casual Resemblances: Rigorous Frameworks for Comparing Regeneration Across Species

The majority of animal phyla have species that can regenerate. Comparing regeneration across animals can reconstruct the molecular and cellular evolutionary history of this process. Recent studies have revealed some similarity in regeneration mechanisms, but rigorous comparative methods are needed to assess whether these resemblances are ancestral pathways (homology) or are the result of convergent evolution (homoplasy). This review aims to provide a framework for comparing regeneration across animals, focusing on gene regulatory networks (GRNs), which are substrates for assessing process homology. The homology of the wound-induced activation of Wnt signaling and of adult stem cells are discussed as examples of ongoing studies of regeneration that enable comparisons in a GRN framework. Expanding the study of regeneration GRNs in currently studied species and broadening taxonomic sampling for these approaches will identify processes that are unifying principles of regeneration biology across animals. These insights are important both for evolutionary studies of regeneration and for human regenerative medicine. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, Volume 37 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Creativity in Action: Exploring Cross-Cutting Models of Self-Organization and Emergence in Science and Technology

This review presents a sequence of exemplary experience-based encounters with self-organizing systems on different levels of difficulty. Based on hands-on experiments and creative modeling it provides a viable educational road to build up a deeper understanding of self-organization principles and their comprehensive nature. Theories of self-organization describe how patterns, structures and new types of behavior emerge in energetically open systems, resulting from the local interaction of many components. As an external control instance is missing, the underlying philosophy is counterintuitive to our habits of causal thinking. This thematic and conceptual framework impacts on many STEM domains and presents a blueprint for modeling emergent structures and complex functions in natural and technological systems. It reveals unifying principles that can help in reducing, in structuring and, finally, in understanding and controlling the emerging complexity. An overview across diverse STEM domains highlights the role of this overarching concept. This cross-disciplinary approach can help in improving the dialogue and the knowledge exchange between the individual fields. Moreover, in a self-referential fashion, the modeling of self-organization provides us with fresh perspectives to reflect our own creative processes.

Mechanisms of Selective Autophagy

Selective autophagy is the lysosomal degradation of specific intracellular components sequestered into autophagosomes, late endosomes, or lysosomes through the activity of selective autophagy receptors (SARs). SARs interact with autophagy-related (ATG)8 family proteins via sequence motifs called LC3-interacting region (LIR) motifs in vertebrates and Atg8-interacting motifs (AIMs) in yeast and plants. SARs can be divided into two broad groups: soluble or membrane bound. Cargo or substrate selection may be independent or dependent of ubiquitin labeling of the cargo. In this review, we discuss mechanisms of mammalian selective autophagy with a focus on the unifying principles employed in substrate recognition, interaction with the forming autophagosome via LIR-ATG8 interactions, and the recruitment of core autophagy components for efficient autophagosome formation on the substrate. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology, Volume 37 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

To rectify Alzheimer's disease etiology, excessive mitochondrial division might be stopped or mitophagy might be promoted

In both in vitro and in vivo Alzheimer's disease (AD) models, mitochondrial dysfunction is a crucial feature that limits neuronal activity and results in A and phosphorylated Tau toxicity. To rectify AD etiology, excessive mitochondrial division might be stopped or mitophagy might be promoted. However, there are still unexplained mysteries surrounding the formation of senile plaques and NFTs, and the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease lacks fundamental unifying principles. Some scientists believe A toxicity and Tau toxicity are upstream processes in mitochondrial dysfunction, while others feel it is a downstream chain of events involving abnormal mitochondria. There are several mitophagy mechanisms for the clearance of dead mitochondria in PINK1 signaling; some are regulated by Parkin, while others are not. Drp1, Mfn1/2, PINK1, or Parkin, according to some researchers, have no role in mitophagy cleaning dysfunctional mitochondria; so, additional study is needed to solve the puzzle of mitophagy signaling pathways for clearing dead mitochondria and conserving high-quality mitochondria. Therapeutic techniques targeting mitophagy activity might be useful in reversing AD etiology.

Across-animal odor decoding by probabilistic manifold alignment

Identifying the common structure of neural dynamics across subjects is key for extracting unifying principles of brain computation and for many brain machine interface applications. Here, we propose a novel probabilistic approach for aligning stimulus-evoked responses from multiple animals in a common low dimensional manifold and use hierarchical inference to identify which stimulus drives neural activity in any given trial. Our probabilistic decoder is robust to a range of features of the neural responses and significantly outperforms existing neural alignment procedures. When applied to recordings from the mouse olfactory bulb, our approach reveals low-dimensional population dynamics that are odor specific and have consistent structure across animals. Thus, our decoder can be used for increasing the robustness and scalability of neural-based chemical detection.

Integrating Interdisciplinary Supportive Care Programs

Now that the needs of those affected by cancer have been well documented, primarily because of biopsychosocial distress screening as the sixth vital sign, it is time to address how these multiple and complex needs can be addressed by organized teams of health care professionals. Internationally, psychosocial oncology and supportive care programs have had significant growth. In addition to the humanistic cancer care provided by treating physicians, the interdisciplinary nature of supportive care creates unique opportunities across institutions and settings and in low- and high-resourced countries to bring compassionate expertise to people affected by serious illness. Although growth has been uneven, the trajectory for the greater need of supportive care services is clear: patient need (aging populations, environmental degradation, unequal resource distribution related to the social determinants of health), limited workforce capacity, and acute concerns about rising health care costs. These trends are expected to only accelerate and are to be seen and utilized as strategic opportunities. There is a serious dearth of strategic information on how to create supportive care programs. This chapter focuses on the unifying principles and essential infrastructure that enables integrated interdisciplinary supportive care programs to grow and, more significantly, to create team cultures that alchemize diversity and conflict into programmatic and clinical excellence.

“The art of endlessly taking another view”

This paper deals with Fichte’s The Characteristics of the Present Age, and in particular with his discussion of the “empty form of knowledge” he claims stands at the centre of the third – i.e. the present – age. Fichte speaks of a fundamental principle that forms the ‘common denominator’ between the third and fourth main epochs. This fundamental principle – the “maxim of comprehensibility” (Maxime der Begreiflichkeit) – makes knowledge and comprehension the measure of all that “counts as being valid and as really existing”. But the question arises: How can one and the same principle act as the “unifying concept” for two different “main epochs of human life”? Does this not go directly against Fichte’s claim that two main epochs differ from each other in every respect, precisely because they arise from two entirely different “unifying principles”, and because everything in them must reflect the difference between their “unifying principles”? Fichte’s answer to this question is as follows: a) the fundamental maxim in question allows for two diametrically opposed interpretations, so that each of them provides the principle or the “unifying concept” from which the third and fourth main epochs arise, and b) the third main epoch only gives rise to the empty form of science, as opposed to “truly real science”: it stands for a careless and easy-going, shallow, conventional, trivializing and incorrect conception of the “fundamental maxim of comprehensibility” – so that it misses what is essential, does not do justice to the fundamental maxim, overlooks its implications, and indeed goes against its innermost meaning. Special attention is paid to the question of whether and how some major features of Fichte’s “empty form of knowledge” result from a misguided and superficial understanding of Kant’s “maxims of the self-preservation of reason” and can be reconstructed from this vantage point.

Evolution of heterodox mesoeconomics

The established «micro-macro» dichotomy in economics can be considered as a methodological trap today. The established «micro-macro» dichotomy in economics can be considered as such a trap today. It does not allow for exploring increasingly complex relationships in the modern economy and new emerging structures. Therefore a new theoretical space – «meso» – was required. This paper shows how, outside the orthodox mainstream, a new area of economic theory – heterodox mesoeconomics – has shaped. Based on more realistic methodological prerequisites, compared with those accepted in mainstream micro- and macroeconomics, it offers new research programmes and explanatory schemes of what is happening in economic life. The unifying principles of heterodox mesoeconomics include several methodological postulates. First, this is a departure from microeconomic foundations and principles of additive aggregation. Mesoeconomics considers the economy as a complex multi-level system in which mesostructures arise as a result of coevolution processes. Second, mesoeconomics focuses not only (and not primarily) on the price coordination mechanism with a predominance of negative feedback, but rather on the effects of positive feedbacks. Therefore, heterodox mesoeconomists investigate more complex spontaneously emerging coordination mechanisms, as well as spatial, functional and temporal mesoeconomic structures. Third, heterodox mesoeconomists focus not only on competition as the basis of economic interactions but also on cooperation, redistribution, joint activities, etc. The paper summarizes experience from the heterodox mesoeconomic research since the 1970s to the present.

Common principles of early mammalian embryo self-organisation

ABSTRACTPre-implantation mammalian development unites extreme plasticity with a robust outcome: the formation of a blastocyst, an organised multi-layered structure ready for implantation. The process of blastocyst formation is one of the best-known examples of self-organisation. The first three cell lineages in mammalian development specify and arrange themselves during the morphogenic process based on cell-cell interactions. Despite decades of research, the unifying principles driving early mammalian development are still not fully defined. Here, we discuss the role of physical forces, and molecular and cellular mechanisms, in driving self-organisation and lineage formation that are shared between eutherian mammals.

The Place of Painting in the Problem of Cinema Frame Composition

I offer a glimpse at the essence of the visual arts, which is related to the conceptual and the visual constructions through which the image is constructed. Although very different from painting, cinema, as a visual art, is influenced by it at a depth that is hard to imagine. I am taking into account the views of Sergei Eisenstein – one of the proponents of the formal theory of cinema, displayed in his theoretical works, as well as several of his films. Changes in the visual arts that result from the advent of photography give new meaning and role of painting. Artists occupied in painting are beginning to look for new ways to solve the problem of three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional surface. In the time that cinema develops own language, it sets to itself similar tasks. At that moment, cinema turns to the familiar visual-artistic experience and its forms in order to construct its own imaginative language. Cinema, like painting, gives us the joy of looking at the form in which the correlation of the elements is sensed. Accordingly, in order to bring pleasure and meaning, this form is created in constructions that we know from the field of painting. Editing, the basis of cinematic language, is built by putting together frames that serve as building blocks of the film. In this capacity they are of utmost importance. It is frame’s compositional organization, which at first takes place in a two-dimensional space as in picture that plays a major role in the approach to the editing. The composition of the frame which is the core of the editing process is built in the parameters of the main points through which the composition in painting can be built – rhythm, dynamics, statics, symmetry, asymmetry, analysis and synthesis of form, and at a later stage of the development of cinema – even color. The visual arts are based on similar structures and ways of building the form though they do it through different languages. There are unifying principles that define the world of images. Whether they are moving or static, their construction is often done on the basis of similar intentions and through similar instruments. Knowing them, understanding them, is a tool for creating quality images.